Reviewed by Heidi Bell

Q Road, Bonnie Jo Campbell's brutal, ironic, and tender novel of rural life charts the tragic events of one day-October 9, 1999-on a particular stretch of county road in Greenland Township, Michigan. The narrative tension builds on the repeated suggestion throughout the first half of the novel that something disastrous will happen this day, something that combines the kind of poor judgment that can only be human with the horrifically detached forces of nature. And Campbell does not disappoint, delivering a terrible climax that is best left to the reader to discover.

The morning of October 9th begins benignly enough with twelve-year-old David Retakker pedaling his bike along Q Road, where farmland is gradually giving way to developed plots-prefabricated homes, a golf course, and a restaurant-cum-farm museum called the Barn Grill-though some families still operate working farms. David is biking toward Greenland Township's oldest barn, which he is scheduled to help farmer George Harland fill with straw. George continues to grow corn and soybeans despite low yield prices, ongoing pressure from developers to sell, and the fact that his hired hand and David's father, Mike Retakker, has left town without notice.

On his way to the barn, David encounters George's young wife, Rachel Crane, an unconventional, abrasive seventeen year old whose love of George's land has led her to marry the fifty-something farmer. George's obsession with and marriage to Rachel has surprised everyone in Greenland-he was formerly so prudent, reserved, and dedicated to his farm that his first wife left from sheer boredom.

This trio of characters-David, Rachel, and George-occupies the center of Q Road, and inundates the novel with the longing of loneliness and unrequited love. David and Rachel are essentially orphans. David and his mother, Sally Retakker, continue to live in the hired hand's dilapidated house on George's land, but David rarely sees his mother, and she often buys beer and cigarettes rather than food or asthma inhalers for her son. Rachel's mother, Margo Crane, disappeared mysteriously in 1996 after an encounter with George's younger brother, Johnny Harland, a swaggering ex-convict who has by his own claims "experience with dozens of young girls" he compares to "the illegal swimming holes he used to sneak into as a teenager-even as he was undressing and diving in, his mind was set on getting away without being caught."

Rachel, fourteen at the time of her mother's disappearance, lies about Margo's whereabouts to avoid being taken in to custody by the state and continues to live alone on the Glutton, the boat grounded on George Harland's side of the river where she was born and raised, never having known her father. George has lived alone in his farmhouse for ten years. The three form a peculiar love triangle: George loves Rachel; Rachel's burning desire to take care of David is the result of the night she almost shot him in her garden, thinking he was a coyote in the brush; David worships George and dreams of overcoming his asthma enough to help work the Harland farm. Through the awkward interactions of these unconventional, isolated characters, Campbell brilliantly illuminates the difficulties of human connection. After David and George have finished filling the barn with straw, George says, "Why don't you come back to the house now for some breakfast? I'll make you eggs and bacon. Or else I got some patty sausage." And though he hasn't eaten since lunch at school the day before, David refuses: "He wanted breakfast, of course, but then George would see how bad his breathing was, and David still had the feeling that one wrong move could spoil everything."

Campbell has assembled a large, varied cast of supporting characters who, like her protagonists, often knock stereotypes on their ears. Sally Retakker, David's neglectful mother, has an oddly appealing slovenliness, and we are not surprised when police officer Tom Parks is charmed by her. April May Rathburn, whose family has lived just down Q Road from the Harland farm for centuries, appears initially as a sensible middle-aged woman who muses that "if only everyone would be sensible and tolerant," the farmers, developers, and prefab homeowners in the township might get along. But April May's magnanimity is tempered by her exhilarated memories of the tornado of 1934, by the experience of watching nature assert itself over humanity. April May also cannot explain exactly what possessed her to watch silently as Rachel Crane buried Johnny Harland's body in the oldest barn in Greenland Township three years before. April May's thoughts of tolerance are also rendered ironic by the egocentric lack of sensitivity exhibited by nearly everyone in the story at one time or another.

Campbell reinforces human short-sightedness as a theme with the historical accounts of people driven from Q Road. The present action of the novel is punctuated by stories of the Potawatomie exile and two women forced out by their communities-one a Potawatomi girl Rachel calls Corn Girl, the other Mary O'Kearsy, a schoolteacher who came to Greenland Township in the early 1930s, only to be sent packing by residents of Q Road when it was discovered she was sleeping with a hired man from the Harland farm. Campbell's finely textured historical background serves to highlight the subjectivity of history itself-how the same events are described differently by different people, how stories change to suit new purposes as they are handed down generation to generation, and how people unwittingly relive their ancestors' mistakes despite their best intentions.

Campbell's thorough knowledge of the natural world serves her themes as well. The novel begins and ends with images of woolly bear caterpillars humping across Q Road, seemingly oblivious of the cars and bicycles that threaten their annual journey toward the shelter of woodpiles and building foundations where they will curl for the winter. The image of the caterpillars is particularly resonant, echoed later by that of the Potawatomie march as well as the sense throughout the novel of ceaseless struggle-animal and human-against natural hazards and even more dangerous human ones. Campbell also suggests that the mindless force driving the woolly bears is similar to the blind desire for expansion at the root of the conflict between the farmers along Q Road and the developers who seek their land like contemporary agents of Manifest Destiny. From her prefabricated home across the street from the Harland farm, Elaine Shore crusades for order on Q Road by filing police complaints for noise and untoward smells, and looking forward to a time "when the neighborhood would be row upon row of neat houses and paved driveways." For her efforts, she is dubbed a "pioneer" by her lawyer.

Such irony is balanced skillfully by Campbell's omniscient third-person narrator with dark humor and vivid, stark description. While Campbell never feels sorry for her characters, she does feel deeply for them. Like real people, none of them is pure, and nothing in Q Road is purely or conventionally beautiful. Instead Campbell makes beauty as fascinating and compelling as Rachel's odd looks or Mary O'Kearsy's face, which Old Harold Harland describes as "beautiful as the day is long" though "the two sides did not quite line up." The magic of this novel, with its grand themes of class, love, and regret, is that the author achieves suspense without manipulation, tenderness without sentimentality, and above all, originality without contrivance in character, plot, and voice.



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